After the Last Dance

by Sarra Manning

  ‘Kissing you properly,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you ever been kissed before?’

  Rose was about to claim that she’d been kissed lots and lots, when she thought about how that might sound. ‘Not really,’ she amended.

  ‘Let me show you,’ Danny said and his voice was so deep it made something quiver in the pit of her stomach. ‘Open your mouth a little bit.’

  She let him kiss her again. It was impossible to refuse him and now she could taste him as well as feel him. The quivering grew stronger and Rose thought her knees might buckle if Danny weren’t holding her up.

  Still he kissed her, tongue delving deep into her mouth, until her lips were sore and she could hardly catch her breath. If a bomb had fallen on them right then she’d have been happy to die in his arms. But when his hand slid underneath her coat, touched her breast for one fleeting moment, she gasped and it was actually rather easy to pull free.

  ‘That’s quite enough.’ Her voice was so weak and breathless she hardly recognised it. ‘I really should be getting home now.’

  Danny stepped back. In the darkness, his face was all angles and shadows. She’d never thought a man could be beautiful, but he was.

  ‘Enough for now,’ he agreed. ‘But you’re going to let me see you again, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, if you’d like to.’ She couldn’t even pretend that she had a million and one things to do, that she wouldn’t be waiting for him. ‘When are you on leave again?’

  Danny tucked his arm in hers. ‘It’s too cold to stand here shooting the breeze. Let’s walk.’

  She was in an agony of not knowing. Finally, as they were walking along Theobalds Road and Rose was already dreading saying goodbye, she could bear it no longer. ‘You never said… when you’re next on leave?’

  ‘I didn’t, did I?’ She’d never think of his grin as sneery again. ‘So, you want to see me again, then?’

  Rose hated this kind of dance. She was terrified that she was going to miss her footing and trip. ‘Only if you want to see me again. You do, don’t you?’

  Then Danny took her hand, and even through her mittens and his gloves, she felt comforted by his touch. ‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet you outside Rainbow Corner same time tomorrow night. Guess I shouldn’t be so keen, but I don’t want you going off with some other guy just because I was too slow to state my intentions.’

  Rose didn’t even care if his intentions were honourable, she was just pleased that he had them. She beamed at him. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’

  But Danny wasn’t there the next night when she came out of Rainbow Corner with Sylvia and Maggie. As she waited for him for ten agonisingly long minutes, Rose thought that he’d stood her up. Sylvia and Maggie thought so too. ‘Rosie, how many times do I have to tell you that all these Yanks are full of hot air and empty promises?’ Sylvia said. ‘Come on, we’ll find you another one to take your mind off things.’

  Reluctantly, Rose allowed them to lead her away. They’d just turned the corner onto Windmill Street to cut through Soho when someone sneaked up and caught her round the waist so she shrieked in alarm. Maggie didn’t miss a beat but hit Danny so hard on the head with her handbag that he unhanded Rose with a shriek of his own.

  It wasn’t the most auspicious of introductions. Maggie didn’t apologise for hitting him and Sylvia took Danny’s hand in a limp grip, looked him up and down with a weary expression, then said, ‘Charmed, I’m sure.’ She sounded far from charmed.

  ‘Can I walk you home, then?’ Danny asked with a smile. He didn’t seem the least put out at the frosty reception.

  She smiled back and had got just as far as saying, ‘Well, I’d like —’ when Sylvia and Maggie linked arms with her and started walking so she had no choice but to walk with them.

  ‘We don’t let Rose walk home with any Tom, Dick or Harry,’ Sylvia threw over her shoulder.

  ‘What about a Danny? Is she allowed to walk home with a Danny?’ he asked as he followed them through the darkened streets. ‘Do I need to get my CO to write a letter of referral?’

  ‘The jury’s still out on Dannies,’ Maggie said.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I can’t think why they’re being like this!’

  Sylvia shot Rose a pitying look. ‘That’s exactly why we’re not letting you walk home with him.’

  Instead Danny came with them to the Bouillabaisse and paid their admission.

  ‘I don’t dance,’ he said once Rose had slipped off her coat and fluffed up her hair, and the band had begun to play something fast and jivey. He looked around the crowded room. ‘You do know this is a negro club?’

  ‘So? The negroes have better manners and better steps than most of the white fellows we dance with,’ Sylvia informed him haughtily but Danny simply shrugged as if he was used to dealing with haughty best friends.

  ‘They’re really awfully nice,’ Rose said and she sat down next to him, because she just wanted to be near him. Close enough that if she leaned in, then Danny might kiss her, but Danny didn’t seem inclined to kiss her, not even when she pursed her lips and gazed up at him. Finally, when the third man plucked up the courage to ask Rose to dance, Danny told her to go ahead.

  In between dances, he bought Maggie and Sylvia a gin and French each and Rose a ginger beer because she had yet to find a palatable grown-up drink, then stood guard over their table while Rose danced with men who weren’t him.

  Rose was always pleased to dance, but she was less pleased that Danny didn’t mind watching her dance with other men. Surely, if he was keen on her, he should mind very much?

  Rose might even have begun to despair but then in the lull between tunes and partners, Danny was there behind her. Wrapping her up in her mother’s coat and his arms, then hustling her up the stairs while Sylvia and Maggie were in the Ladies’ with Rose’s red lipstick.

  When she tried to tell Danny that, he shushed her with a kiss. ‘I’ll buy you another lipstick,’ he promised, when she tore her mouth away from his because she simply couldn’t bear the violent fluttering of her heart any longer. ‘I need to spend some time alone with you.’

  It was a cold, soupy night. Tendrils of fog curled around them, though Rose would have sworn on a whole stack of bibles that she could see stars in the skies. ‘I’m sorry about Maggie and Sylvia. They do tend to be rather over-protective.’ Rose half expected them to suddenly come charging out of the door of the club and demand that Danny unhand her.

  Rose didn’t want to be unhanded, especially when Danny tightened his arms around her and his look became less fond and more determined. ‘So, the place where you live, do you have your own room?’

  ‘Oh no. I share a tiny room with Sylvia and she’ll probably be home soon, I should think.’

  ‘There’s nowhere we can be alone?’ Danny said in a low voice that tickled her ear and made Rose feel heavy and languorous. ‘Just the two of us.’

  Rose knew exactly what he was angling for. She’d heard Phyllis and Maggie whisper about someone called Brian who’d broken Phyllis’s heart after she’d allowed him certain intimacies that would ensure Brian was horsewhipped if Phyllis’s father ever found out.

  Then there had been those white-faced, red-eyed girls at her father’s surgery with their grim-looking mothers. They were sent off to a home on the outskirts of Newcastle and returned a few months later, fatter and even paler. And Rose had been in London for four whole months now, long enough to know exactly what those brassy-looking girls meant when they shouted ‘Quick march! Marble Arch style!’ at the GIs on their way to Rainbow Corner.

  Besides, there was something frightening and unpredictable about kissing Danny – as if Rose no longer knew herself or could begin to guess at what she might say or do so he’d agree to never stop kissing her.

  So Rose made sure her eyes were especially wide. ‘There’s nowhere.’ She didn’t even have to fake the tremble in her tone, because Danny might be the sort of fellow who only wanted to take liberties and if she didn’t let
him take them then he might just walk off into the fog and never be seen again.

  ‘I guess it’s just as well that you’re so pretty,’ Danny said at last. ‘Though I have to tell you, kid, pashing in doorways isn’t my style.’

  ‘It’s not mine, either,’ Rose said with a little more conviction now she’d got her way. ‘But it’s just as well that you are jolly good at pashing in doorways because you don’t even dance!’

  No one, not Shirley or Sylvia, had ever suggested that making a man laugh might guarantee his devotion. But making Danny laugh seemed to be the magic trick that kept him coming back night after night.

  Danny was a bomber pilot. Or rather he hadn’t denied it when Rose asked him, but cocked an eyebrow and said he knew his way around a plane. Though currently he was grounded and temporarily stationed in London. Something to do with an old injury that he insisted was nothing and something official that he wasn’t allowed to talk about, which meant he was billeted at the Columbia Club in Lancaster Gate for two weeks.

  Fourteen nights. By her reckoning, Rose was in love with him by the sixth.

  Danny never came into Rainbow Corner, but he’d be waiting for Rose outside when she appeared with one, or sometimes all three, of her chaperones, though Phyllis thought Danny was splendid. ‘He looks like a younger, more rugged Ronald Colman,’ she’d sighed after she’d been introduced, but that didn’t mean that she was lax in her duties.

  Each night, Danny followed them to the Paramount or the Bouillabaisse or if they could bear to walk that far, to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, where they now held dances. He’d pay their entrance fee, secure them a table, buy their drinks and watch Rose dance with other men. Phyllis, Maggie and especially Sylvia were ever-vigilant and never left the two of them alone so it got harder to sneak away for those fierce, drugging kisses. Harder, but not impossible: Rose would seek out the darkest corners of the club and wait, heart racing, for two hands to steal around her waist, lips to kiss her neck.

  He’d touch her too. Sliding his hands down to rest on her hips or shape her breasts over whichever borrowed frock she was wearing and Rose would let him because for the first few seconds that his hands moved on her she could barely remember her own name. Then she’d come to her senses and push him away. ‘You mustn’t do that.’ She never really sounded that firm. ‘It’s not right.’

  Sometimes she thought that she didn’t even say it for propriety’s sake but because Danny would grin when she did. A slow, insolent grin that made her feel exactly the way his kisses did and when they finally stumbled out of the dancehall for the long, kiss-bitten walk home, she was so heated up that she never even noticed the bitter sting of the dark winter night.

  11

  Nothing could be further from the rent-protected garret Jane had imagined. Not this beautifully restored house with its double-height rooms, gleaming tessellated tiles and parquet flooring and all those period bits and bobs: architraves, ceiling roses and whatnot. Then there was the art – as Jane followed Anna back down the stairs before dinner, they passed a Pollock, three Mondrians and God knows what else.

  Being guided through a stranger’s house, her footsteps echoing as they crossed the hall, Jane felt as if she was being directed towards a doctor’s office. No hope of a cure. Worse, she was remembering Charles again. Arriving at his house. The waif and stray that he took in, no questions asked, no answers given.

  She never liked to dwell on those first few months in London – it now felt as if they’d happened to someone else, another girl – but when she did, the memories were unwelcome. She couldn’t say how long it was before she’d been able to sleep in the bed in the charming mint-green and white guest room. At first, she’d slept under the bed, the floor pristine, the carpet soft, with the knife clutched in one hand and the grimy roll of banknotes in the other.

  She’d only come out when she heard Charles leave and it wasn’t a Monday or a Thursday when his cleaning lady came. She’d head straight to the kitchen where there was so much food. Peanut butter, even if it was the crunchy, wholenut kind, tiny sweet apples, individual pots of yoghurt, foil triangles of soft cheese and square white bread that Charles must have bought solely for her. Jane ate it all.

  Then she’d spend hours in the bath, door locked and a chair wedged under the handle. She’d never felt so clean before and when she slid under the water to see how long she could hold her breath, she always came up for air long before she needed to.

  But it still felt as if she was on borrowed time. Because one night had turned into so many days – she’d counted more than one hundred – and she’d have to leave eventually and the world outside this house was waiting to hurt her. And if she stayed, well, he’d given her somewhere to stay, fed her, clothed her. Of course he was going to want something in return.

  One night she was waiting in the hall when he got back from wherever he went all day. She’d hardly been able to look at him that first night and now she was surprised that he wasn’t as tall or as grey as she thought he was.

  He was a fair, slender man with a pink and white complexion, in his forties, though she hadn’t known that then. ‘In your forties’ looked a lot different where she’d come from.

  ‘Hello,’ he’d said as if he wasn’t surprised to see her standing there. She’d followed him into the kitchen and leaned against the door to watch as he took things, vegetables mostly, out of the fridge chopped and stirred, added spices, then served two plates of something he called stir fry but was nothing like the Chinese takeaway she’d had the one time.

  She ate, head down, fork held like a weapon, arm shielding her plate, and when she was finished, she took their empty plates and washed them up because she could do that for him and she waited for Charles to tell her what else she could do, but he never did.

  He simply indicated she should follow him into the huge lounge at the back of the house. There was a big, grey tweedy sofa and he sat on it and gestured at the space at the other end, so there was distance between them. She didn’t even feel scared. That surprised her, because she couldn’t ever remember a time that she hadn’t felt scared. It was always there, a rusty, cold trickle at the back of her throat, skin shrinking away from her bones; and in wondering why she wasn’t scared, she realised that she hadn’t been scared for quite some time now.

  ‘It’s Friday,’ he said, which meant nothing to her. ‘I like to unwind by watching a film on Friday night. Do you have any favourite films?’

  Films were either Disney cartoons or something with car chases and explosions, people getting smashed up. She looked at him like he might just be taking the piss, but he didn’t notice, just got up, walked over to the shelves about the TV and selected a DVD.

  Then they watched Barefoot in the Park . It was still one of her favourite films.

  That was their new routine. Dinner and a movie. Three weeks it took her to say what she wanted to say but it was still completely inadequate. ‘Thanks,’ she said, before she washed their plates from the Sunday roast he’d cooked.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Charles said. ‘There is a dishwasher under the counter to your left.’

  ‘It’s all right. I want to do this.’

  It was baby steps all the way. The first time she got up before Charles left for work, so she could wash up his breakfast things. The first time she got up before him to make him breakfast because she now knew that every morning he had porridge with just a splash of honey in it and precisely nine fat flame raisins. The first time she left the house with Charles to go to a fancy supermarket and dog his footsteps as he wheeled a trolley around.

  Probably the biggest step was the night that she slept in the bed instead of underneath it, the knife still in her hand and the bundle of notes under her pillow. Or maybe the biggest step was the evening that Charles came home from work to find her in the kitchen chopping and stirring and adding spices, which wasn’t unprecedented by this stage, but the wad of money placed where he always sat was.

  But i
t had taken months to get there – before that there had been months of unease, of being an interloper, an intruder. How many times had she revisited that feeling over the years? How many times had she pretended that she felt right at home even when she was sure that it was all a dream and that she’d wake up on rotting carpet underneath a sagging single bed in a damp, dilapidated house on the worst street in the roughest estate in Gateshead?

  That feeling was with her now as Jane paused outside the dining room. The table was laid with white linen; the heavy silver cutlery and lead-cut crystal gleamed dully in the soft candlelight. And there was Leo, leaning against a sideboard in the same mid-century modern style as the table and chairs. Still unwashed, still unshaven, still wearing the clothes he’d got married in. ‘Ah, there she is!’ he announced as if he’d spent hours combing the house trying to find her. ‘I knew she had to be around here somewhere.’

  He was talking to an older woman who was gazing down the length of the table to check that each piece of cutlery, every glass, every napkin was in perfect alignment. She was maybe late forties, early fifties – it was hard to tell – and had curly blonde hair cut short, her soft, pudding-like features arranged into a faintly harried expression as she smiled vaguely at Jane.